The suite was too small for this many ghosts.
Doris's first thought on waking was that someone had moved the furniture. Her second was that someone had moved time.
Her parents snored.
That was the third shock.
Her father lay on a pallet Dorothy had bullied out of the quartermaster, blanket askew, one arm flung over his face. Her mother had taken
the chair Flint usually claimed, curled into it with the easy confidence of someone who had slept in worse places than a tower room.
Brian lay in his cradle between them, arms spread wide, mouth open, making small sleep noises that sounded like he was arguing with
invisible bugs.
The hum was crowded.
Doris could feel it: the way the wardlines tracked three generations in one room, cataloguing new weights and old echoes. The Herenvale shard, tucked under her pillow, pulsed faintly like a second heartbeat.
John lay beside her on the pallet, eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
"You're awake," she whispered.
"Have been," he replied. "Your mother kicks in her sleep."
"She always has," Doris said. "Once broke my nose."
"That explains a few things," Flint mumbled from the far corner. He'd given up his chair to Mara and stacked blankets under the window
instead, claiming the cold helped his thinking. "Do we have to get up? There are too many parents in here for anything good to happen."
As if summoned by blasphemy, Mara snorted awake.
"Parents are why you exist," she said, rubbing her eyes. "Show some gratitude, knife goblin."
Flint sat up, offended. "I am not a goblin," he said. "I'm at least half sprite."
Edrin, Doris's father, pushed his arm off his eyes and blinked around the room.
"This ceiling has too many stars," he muttered.
Brian chose that moment to let out a small wail.
The crooked star flared sympathetically.
The room's hum tightened, then smoothed.
Three generations.
Three different instincts.
Doris reached for her son.
Mara reached for tea.
Edrin reached for his boots.
John reached for the wall.
"Ledger," Doris murmured, watching the way the chalk stars flickered around her parents' presence.
"In a minute," John said. "Let's make sure no one falls over first."
Breakfast was chaos.
Not Paragon chaos.
Domestic chaos.
Mara took one look at the stale bread Halvar's overworked aides had dropped off and declared it a crime against taste.
"We are in a capital city," she said, scandalised. "There is a market two streets away. You have been eating this?"
Flint, mouth full, said, "It's not that bad."
She plucked the bread out of his hand, sniffed it, and hurled it into the bin with terrifying accuracy.
"It's an insult," she said. "Dorothy, where is the nearest kitchen?"
Dorothy, who had been drinking tea with the resigned air of a woman watching a flood roll toward an unprotected field, pointed with her
cup. "Down the corridor, left, third door," she said. "If you get into a fight with the cooks, aim low, they carry knives."
"I carry bigger ones," Mara said cheerfully.
Edrin caught her sleeve. "We're guests," he reminded her. "Try not to start a civil war before midday."
"Then they should feed their Voidborn properly," she said, untangling herself. "Dori, give me your key."
"The kitchens don't have—" Doris began.
Mara was already gone.
Flint watched her go with something like awe.
"I'm in love," he said.
"Don't," Doris and John said together.
Edrin shifted closer to the pallet where Brian lay, now awake and gnawing on his own fist.
"You shouldn't let her intimidate the kitchen," Edrin said mildly. "They hold the real power here. Food lines, not wardlines."
Doris snorted. "Maevra would argue," she said.
"She'd be wrong," Edrin replied.
John half-smiled.
"I like him," Flint decided.
"You like anyone who brings food or knives," Dorothy said.
"Consistent tastes are a virtue," Flint replied.
Mara returned twenty minutes later smelling of steam and triumph, balanced under the weight of a lidded pot and three pilfered loaves that looked like they'd been baked this century.
The guard outside the door looked traumatised.
"What did you do?" John asked.
"Negotiated," Mara said, setting the pot on the table. "Turns out the head cook's sister married into a caravan I used to travel with.
He owed me a favor."
"You've been here less than a day," Doris said. "How do you already have leverage?"
"I pay attention," her mother said. "You should try it. Liar, get bowls."
Flint sprang into action.
Mara lifted the lid.
Steam rolled out, fragrant with herbs and something that might, generously, be called vegetable stew.
"Proper breakfast," she said. "Eat before your Rector finds you. He looks like he forgets to chew between crises."
"He does," John said.
"You can't talk," Doris muttered.
They ate.
The stew was thin, but hot, and not stale bread.
Brian watched each spoonful with keen interest, drool soaking his bib.
"Not yet," Doris told him. "You'll have to settle for milk."
He gurgled, unconvinced.
"Ledger," John said finally, tapping the book.
Doris wiped her hands and opened it.
She wrote:
— Parents arrived. Suite overcrowded. Tower hum tracking three generations + one Herenvale shard. Mother has declared war on stale bread. Moral: kitchens fear her more than Paragons.
She hesitated.
Then added:
— Father told full Herenvale story. Shard now ours. Feels like carrying a small grave and a warning.
She underlined warning.
Edrin watched her write, eyes soft and sad and proud in complicated measures.
"You picked up the habit," he said.
"Someone had to," she said. "The tower doesn't keep a single ledger. It keeps ten thousand in different hands."
"Good," he said. "That's how you keep people honest. And stones."
Halvar did, in fact, forget to chew between crises.
He found them mid-morning in the quiet room, where Doris had retreated with John and Brian for baseline drills while Mara and Flint waged culinary war on the kitchens.
Edrin had tagged along, ostensibly to "see how the young people broke themselves these days."
Halvar paused in the doorway at the sight of another older Aetheris in the room.
The hum prickled.
Two Voidborn lines.
One active.
One retired.
Great.
"Doriane," Halvar said. "John. You dragged more history into my chamber."
"This is my father," Doris said. "Edrin. He helped tune Herenvale before it folded."
Halvar's face shifted in something like respect.
"Then you have my condolences and my professional curiosity," he said. "We've been working off secondhand reports and fragments."
Edrin shrugged. "Most of what I remember is screaming stone and people running the wrong way," he said. "But I can tell you what not to do."
"That's half my job," Halvar said. "The other half is convincing stubborn people not to do it anyway."
"I see why Dorothy likes you," Edrin said.
Halvar looked almost offended. "She insults me three times a day," he said.
"She insults the people she respects," Edrin replied.
From her chair in the corner, Dorothy lifted her cup in a silent toast.
"Tea," she said. "Not respect. Don't get ideas."
Halvar rolled his eyes and turned back to Doris and John.
"We're adjusting the chapel-simul today," he said. "Maevra wants a clearer picture of how the sanctum shell might react when we introduce new—" he glanced at Brian, "—variables."
Doris tightened the sling automatically.
"Not him," she said. "Not for full runs. We agreed."
Halvar lifted a hand. "I know," he said. "Today is about the Herenvale shard. We'll keep Brian on the bench. He can supervise."
Brian gnawed on his fist, unimpressed by his demotion.
Edrin's gaze sharpened. "You're putting the shard into the pattern?" he asked.
"Gently," Halvar said. "In a controlled environment. We want to see how a sanctum echo responds to a relic of failure before we carry it under Third Chapel and drop it into the real field."
Edrin's jaw tightened. "I don't like the idea of waking that memory," he said.
"You brought it," Halvar reminded him.
"To warn my daughter," Edrin said. "Not to tempt a sanctum into re-enacting an old disaster."
"We're not tempting," Lyr's voice drifted from the side wall; she had slipped in unnoticed, slate under her arm. "We're… informing.
Showing the pattern a shape and saying, 'This is bad. Don't do this.' Stones learn. They're slow, but they learn."
"Or they copy," Edrin said.
"Yes," Lyr said. "Which is why we're here. To make sure what they copy is what we mean, not what we fear."
The argument could have gone on for hours.
It might have.
John cut in.
"Test it here," he said. "Or we go in blind later. Those are the options. I'd rather the room with chalk and walls that like us."
Doris nodded.
"Let's see what it remembers," she said quietly.
The shard sat in the center of the room like a misplaced tooth.
Halvar had cleared the floor, wiped away older chalk, refreshed the baseline hum until the stone vibrated with a clean, steady tone.
Then Doris stepped forward and placed the Herenvale chip gently on the bare stone.
The room noticed immediately.
The hum contracted around it.
Not in fear.
In curiosity.
A new thing.
Old resonance.
Edrin's shoulders hunched.
Lyr moved to one side, slate ready.
"Baseline first," Halvar said. "No chapel. No sanctum. Just tower and shard. Listen."
John stood at the wall, palms flat.
Brian, in Dorothy's lap, watched with grave eyes.
Doris remained near the shard, not touching it, hands clasped to keep from fidgeting.
The room's note wobbled.
Not much.
Just enough that John could tell where the shard sat with his eyes closed.
"Feels like a bruise," he said softly. "Not bleeding. Just… tender."
"Anchors remember their last task," Lyr said. "Even when the lines are gone, the stone keeps an echo of the last pattern it carried. This one remembers strain. And collapse."
Edrin flinched.
"You can tell that?" he asked.
Doris answered.
"Yes," she said. "It's… like smelling smoke on cloth long after the fire's out. You can tell if it was wood or oil. Controlled or wild."
Halvar nodded once.
"Chapel layer," he said. "Soft. No sanctum yet."
Serais stepped to the wall and began to hum.
A simple line.
No words.
Just a tone the chapel used as a base for more complex hymns.
The room responded, overlaying itself with the familiar warmth.
The shard reacted.
John felt the change like a chill.
The bruise woke.
A faint, crackling sensation radiated from the center of the floor.
Not enough to hurt.
Enough to warn.
"It doesn't like chapels," Elian whispered.
Edrin exhaled through his teeth.
"Herenvale's chapel was where the sanctum hooked to the town," he said. "When it failed, everything above it went with it. If this chip
remembers anything, it's that sacred stones can lie."
Serais's note wavered.
Halvar lifted a hand.
"Hold," he murmured. "Don't push. We want to see if it calms."
Doris stepped closer.
The shard pulsed under her bare feet.
Not physically.
In the hum.
She crouched, keeping her hands on the floor, not the stone.
"You're not there anymore," she whispered. "You're not holding that town. You don't have to. It's over."
The room's resonance shivered.
The crackle around the shard eased.
Not gone.
But diminished.
"Interesting," Lyr said, scribbling. "It responds to Voidborn voice even without sanctum field."
Halvar's mouth tightened.
"Sanctum echo," he said. "Carefully."
Lyr traced a small, soft-edged pulse into the pattern, nothing like the full activation marks, just enough to hint at deeper structure.
The hum deepened.
Now John could feel three layers:
Tower.
Chapel.
Sanctum.
And under them, the bruised ripple of Herenvale.
The shard thrummed.
He swallowed.
"That's bad," he said.
"Describe," Halvar said. His own hand pressed to the wall, knuckles white.
"Feels like… someone hearing a familiar voice and flinching," John said. "Not because they hate it. Because they remember what came after."
Doris closed her eyes.
She recognised that feeling.
Herenvale had been a sanctum gone wrong under a chapel that thought it was safe.
Third Chapel was a sanctum not yet gone wrong under a chapel that was starting to suspect it wasn't.
She leaned closer to the shard, bracing a hand on either side of it.
"Listen," she said softly. "Here is what happened when we pushed you wrong."
She let herself remember.
Not in careful, sanitized bits.
In full.
The way her father had described it: the horizon bending, the weight in the air, the sound of stone tearing.
She didn't speak images.
She spoke shape.
The way the hum had gone from steady to screaming.
The way dozens of wrong signals had piled into the anchor until it broke.
The shard resonated.
The room's note warped.
John flinched.
"Careful," he hissed.
Doris pushed on.
Then she shifted.
Projected the now.
Third Chapel.
Brian's laugh.
The bell's change.
The way the anchor there had hesitated at a different pattern.
"You don't have to be Herenvale," she whispered. "You can be the chapel that refused. You can be the sanctum that said no when someone tried to teach you to crack on purpose."
It felt ridiculous.
Talking to a chip of stone as if it were a person.
The hum did not think it ridiculous.
The shard's vibration softened.
The bruise sensation under John's hand eased, fading from sharp throb to dull ache.
The chapel layer steadied around it.
The sanctum pulse settled, no longer activating old pain, just acknowledging it.
Lyr's chalk squeaked across slate.
Serais let out a breath he'd been holding.
Elian's eyes shone.
Halvar swallowed hard.
"Tempting," he said quietly. "To believe we can teach stones morality."
"We can't," Doris said, straightening slowly. "But we can teach them consequences. If the sanctum under Third feels this shard when it
thinks about moving, maybe it will remember folding is an option. And avoid it."
Edrin's hands had been fists at his sides.
Now they opened.
"The town is dead," he said hoarsely. "But if a piece of it can keep another one from dying the same way… it's something."
Brian burbled.
The hum around him chimed in reply.
Halvar clapped his hands once, too loud in the close space.
"Enough for today," he said. "We've got our first data. We won't push further until we've slept."
"Speak for yourself," Lyr murmured, eyes alight. "I'm going to be up all night with these notes."
"Sleep," Dorothy said. "Or I will hide your ink."
Lyr considered.
Sighed.
"Fine," she said. "Half the night."
On the way back to the suite, Edrin fell into step beside John.
"You hear more than you should," he said.
John huffed a laugh. "That's what Halvar says," he replied. "Usually with more swearing."
"It's… unusual," Edrin said. "For someone without Voidborn training. Or Church indoctrination."
"Thank you," John said dryly.
Edrin's mouth quirked.
"If I'd had you in Herenvale," he said, "I might have noticed the sanctum's strain earlier."
"You had people like me," John said. "You just weren't listening. No offense."
"Taken," Edrin said. "We thought we knew better. We had equations. Models. Charts." He grimaced. "We forgot how to listen to the
spooked ones who said 'the floor feels wrong.'"
John thought of the first time he'd put his hand on the tower wall and said no.
Of how long it had taken him to admit he was feeling something real.
"Doris believed me before I did," he said.
Edrin nodded.
"She's stubborn in the right directions," he said. "She gets that from her mother."
"And from you," John said.
Edrin shrugged.
"I get it from her grandmother," he replied.
They walked in silence for a few steps.
Then Edrin said, too casually, "You intend to go under the chapel with her."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," John said.
"You could stay up here," Edrin said. "Hold the suite. Hold the boy. Let the Voidborn and the priests and the wardens go play under
altars."
"No," John said. "I can't."
"Can't?" Edrin asked. "Or won't?"
John stopped.
So did Edrin.
The corridor hummed quietly around them, ward-sigils pulsing.
"Both," John said. "If I stay up here and something goes wrong under the chapel, I'll hear it. I'll feel it. And I won't be there to push back. If I go down there and something goes wrong up here, Dorothy and Flint and half the tower will be between our son and the Paragons. I trust them. I don't trust anyone else to stand between your daughter and a sanctum but us."
Edrin studied him.
"You love her," he said.
"Yes," John said simply.
"And the boy," Edrin added.
"Yes."
Edrin sighed.
"My instincts say I should forbid it," he said. "Tell you to keep her away from the cracks. Keep him away. Take you all back to some village and pretend we can outrun the world again."
John's throat tightened.
"And?" he asked.
"And I saw Herenvale fold," Edrin said softly. "Running doesn't stop the ground from breaking. It just changes which people fall in. If you both have a chance to hold the line, I don't have the right to chain you to a quieter edge."
He cleared his throat, as if the admission had scraped something raw.
"But understand this," he said. "I am giving you my daughter and my grandson for this madness. Not as tools. As people. If you ever start treating them otherwise—if you ever talk about them the way those old men used to talk about anchor capacity and acceptable loss—I will drag you out of that sanctum by your ears."
John swallowed.
"I will never see them as anything but themselves," he said. "If the day comes when the only way to fix a crack is to break him, I'll help Doris let the world fall."
Edrin's eyes searched his face.
Found something there worth trusting.
"Good," he said. "Then we're on the same line."
That night, the suite felt different.
Not just more crowded.
More rooted.
Mara commandeered a corner and set up a makeshift kitchen from pilfered pots and a spirit stove Flint produced from somewhere he refused to explain.
"Don't start a fire," Dorothy warned.
"I'll only burn what deserves it," Mara said.
Edrin mended one of John's old coats with long, careful stitches, humming under his breath.
Brian crawled—well, wriggled with intent—between chalk stars as if he were mapping them by proximity.
Doris sat at the table with the Herenvale shard in her hand.
She turned it between her fingers, feeling the faint warmth, the memory.
She wrote in the ledger:
— Herenvale shard introduced to quiet room. Baseline + chapel + sanctum echo around it. Initial reaction: bruise, flinch, then gradual
easing when told "not there, not now." Pattern suggests anchors can "learn" consequences without re-enacting them. Risk: teaching Third Chapel to fear too much and lock up. Need balance.
She paused.
Then added:
— Father trust: conditional but real. He gave us his memory and his stone. Told John he'd drag him out by the ears if he turned us into
tools. I am weirdly comforted.
John leaned over, reading.
"You spelled 'weirdly' with three e's," he said.
"I'm tired," she replied.
He kissed the top of her head.
"We're not alone," he said quietly.
"No," she agreed. "That's what scares me. And saves me."
She closed the ledger.
Mara finished her tinkering with the stove.
A faint, pleasant smell filled the room—something like spiced porridge.
Brian yawned and rubbed his eyes.
Dorothy tapped her staff once.
"Chalk," she said.
Doris looked up.
"We're out," she said. "Halvar used the last in the quiet room."
Dorothy reached into her coat and produced a small, battered box.
Inside, neatly stacked, were sticks of chalk in different colors: white, gray, pale blue, dull red.
"Your grandmother always carried some," Dorothy said. "She claimed it kept her sane. I stole the habit. Time you had your own."
Doris took a piece of pale blue chalk.
It left a faint, glowing line on the stone when she drew a small circle above the cradle.
"Another star?" John asked.
"Not tonight," she said.
She drew a simple shape instead: a line, then another crossing it, then a small curve underneath.
Edrin squinted. "That's not any ward I taught you," he said.
"It's not a ward," Doris said. "It's a reminder."
Elian, if he'd been there, would have called it a crude house symbol.
To Doris, it was the first shape she'd ever drawn as a child that meant home—two lines and a curve, a shelter.
She added three tiny dots inside.
"Us," she said. "And him."
She looked at the Herenvale shard.
At the letter pinned above the bed.
At her parents.
At John.
At Brian.
"Sanctums remember what we let them," she murmured. "So do we."
The hum in the walls wrapped around the new chalk line.
It didn't understand houses.
It understood holding.
It labeled the symbol under its own strange vocabulary: this pattern matters.
Brian fell asleep under it, thumb in his mouth, breath even.
Doris lay down beside him.
John lay on the other side.
Mara took the chair.
Edrin the pallet.
Flint the blankets.
Dorothy her corner.
The tower hummed.
Under Third Chapel, the sanctum tasted the faint ghost of Herenvale and the new, fragile chalk shape of a house.
In the palace, a letter waited on a desk, unanswered for one more day.
In the Paragons' hidden places, Echo refined diagrams, factoring in the new variable of an old shard.
Old roads, new lines.
In one crowded room, three generations of Aetheris breathed together, and the stone adjusted its patterns around them.
For now, the cracks held.
For now, the house symbol stood.
For now, that was enough.